Loose / Lose It would appear that there is a gargantuan, international conspiracy afoot, a conspiracy pursuing, with ruthless efficiency, the goal of causing a major blood vessel in my head to EXPLODE! Some examples of my latest bugbear, randomly grabbed from Twitter [emphasis mine]:

Is it just me? Because this one drives me c-r-a-z-y-! Are we sitting comfortably?

Loose – rhymes with goose, moose and juice. Loose is almost always used as an adjective:

He wore comfortable, loose-fitting clothing to his Pilates class.

Loose lips sink ships.

She pulled the scrunchie out of her hair and shook it loose.

“Daddy, I have a loose tooth!”

Lose – rhymes with booze, cruise and glues. Lose is a verb:

I love to lose myself in the music.

Did you lose some followers on Twitter today?

If he does that again, I’m going to lose it!

Just to confuse us all, Loosecan be used as a verb, but this is rare and usually in a somewhat archaic sentence form:

Robin Hood loosed an arrow at the Sheriff of Nottingham’s head.

I appreciate that once again, this is a phonetic problem. The double O in “loose” looks like it should be pronounced “ooooooo” as in “loooooooze.” But it isn’t, so learn the difference.

Pop Quiz – there are two CVs from people of similar background, education, training and experience and one slot left on the shortlist. One of the CVs is letter-perfect and the other has three errors in it. Assume that the decision-maker is remotely literate. (a) Which CV is going in the bin? (b) Why is it that the only people who have a problem with the answer to question (a) are careless, sloppy writers?

I have seen CV after CV dumped for mistakes like this and there are no two ways about it – people who can spell, who have taken the time and trouble to learn off all the myriad rules and exceptions in the English language; they are very harsh and judgemental people. I know, I’m one of them. While I will admit that this stuff irritates me at some basal level, I don’t dump your CV with any sense of pleasure, malice or superiority. Please believe me when I tell you that I have no feelings whatsoever about your CV … or you. When I am in the hiring chair, it’s just a numbers game. I have too many CVs on the pile and carelessness/sloppiness like this makes my job of whittling down the pile just a little easier.

SUMMARY: If it is a ‘doing’word in your sentence, you almost should almost always be spelling it L-O-S-E. If it’s a ‘describing’word in your sentence, then it’s almost always going to be L-O-O-S-E. (rhymes with Goose, Juice, Moose, Spruce, Noose, Truce, Mousse, Recluse …)

Be altruistic about this and save an old curmudgeon from an aneurysm; or be selfish about this and stop yourself from looking like a sub-literate, incompetent clown. Either way, get it right.

Up with this I will not put!

Vizzini: “He didn’t fall? In-con-ceiv-able!”
Inigo: “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

PS: Since I started writing this post (about 20 minutes ago), there have been 217 tweets with the word “loosing” in them – and in every single one of them the usage was incorrect. UPDATE:Crimes Against English very kindly notified me of the excellent little website – loseloose.com – so it’s not just me then …